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Apple and the SuperFly

What do you think of replacing advertising with art on billboards, bus shells and street posters?

My SuperFly exhibitions did this in 2009 and 2010 – now Apple are doing the same.

Despite having not seen it in the flesh I really like the Shot on iPhone 6 poster campaign by Apple as a simple piece of advertising design. As the campaign title suggests the images on the posters have been captured on the iPhone 6, demonstrating the power and versatility of the camera And yet it took a piece on the Creative Review blog to help me realise that my interest ran deeper than the simplicity of the design. The campaign felt very ‘SuperFly’.

With SuperFly I set out to create an openly accessible art exhibition using spaces usually reserved for advertising. Adverts often use great art, old and new, as part of the composition, however the focus is on selling the product.

The Shot on iPhone 6 campaign is clearly selling a device, but it is doing so by demonstrating the output of the device, in print, via the creativity of its user.

Being ‘the most successful company in the entire history of civilisation’ means that Apple can dispense with the (limited) branding and sponsorship that I needed to accommodate, which makes the minimalist design even stronger.

And of course – given the recent (and impending) Art Everywhere initiative – Apple trump again in my eyes by using images of completely unknown photographers (unknown to me at least) when they could easily have given their device to a celebrity photographer and demonstrated its power that way (see the clip below (referring to the iPhone 4S) and ask yourself what the iPhone 6 campaign could have been in the hands of Annie Leibovitz?!)

So five years on Apple bring their own brand of SuperFly to the streets – although I’m guessing they were able to afford several more poster sites than I was…

Have a read of the article (by @belford_paul) and then jump to the SuperFly article (also on the Creative Review blog from 2009) – is it time to revive the SuperFly street exhibition?

One thought on “Apple and the SuperFly”

This is how commercials were back in the late 90s – remember the Guinness adverts ‘tick follow tock’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9znA_dwjHw, marketing execs were willing to take more risks back then and sign off artistic campaigns.